Ellis Island, located in the upper bay of New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty, is distinguished as the location of one of America’s most noteworthy immigration stations from 1892 until 1954. While Ellis Island was initially just a little more than three acres in size, it was eventually expanded to encompass more than twenty-five acres, accommodating more than thirty buildings, including the main immigration facility, hospitals, and dormitories. Historically the island, alternatively known as Kioshk, Oyster, Bucking, or Anderson’s Island, had been the property of Samuel Ellis and his family from the 1770s until 1807. Prior to the War of 1812 (1812–1814), the island became the site of Fort Gibson, an American arsenal responsible for the defense of the harbor against foreign naval vessels. In addition to being the location of one of America’s largest and busiest immigration stations, Ellis Island was also used as a military hospital throughout both World Wars, a deportation center, a training facility for the U.S. Coast Guard, and most recently an immigration museum and research center. While Ellis Island is popularly considered the historical gateway into America and a symbol of the nation’s immigrant heritage, its history often demonstrates the complexities of foreign immigration into the United States. For example, while Ellis Island’s reputation promotes the idea of America as wholly inclusive to immigrants, its symbolism is simultaneously contradicted by the exclusionary policies of the period such as the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), the National Origins Act (1924), and subsequent quota laws.
The immigrant landing station at Ellis Island, New York, in 1905. From 1892 to 1954, Ellis Island served as the point of entry for more than 12 million immigrants to the United States. More than just a historical gateway into America, however, for many, many American families Ellis Island—and all of its historical and emotional associations, both good and bad—looms large as the legendary threshold through which their ancestors gained access to the process of becoming American citizens and thus became fully invested in the mythos of the American Dream. (Library of Congress)
Prior to the establishment of Ellis Island, the state of New York was responsible for providing immigration services, which were conducted at Castle Garden or Castle Clinton from 1855 until 1890. In 1890 Ellis Island was named the first federal immigration station by President Benjamin Harrison (1889–1893), and it was officially opened on January 1, 1892. The first immigration station processed one and a half million immigrants into the United States between 1892 and 1897. However, on June 15, 1897, the island’s immigration station burned, destroying the facilities and, more importantly for today’s researchers, the period’s immigration records. As a result, new fireproof facilities opened on December 17, 1900, designed and built by the architectural firm of Boring and Tilton. The new Ellis Island immigration station was larger, designed to accommodate approximately half a million immigrants per year, although this proved insufficient. In response to the need for more room, the island was expanded through landfill to accommodate the construction of larger immigration facilities and a multitude of extra buildings, including more than a dozen hospitals and dormitories.
While Ellis Island was hardly the only port for American immigration, with other destinations such as Boston on the Atlantic coast and San Francisco on the Pacific, Ellis Island nevertheless soon became noted as the historic gateway to the United States for immigrants from Europe. In excess of twelve million immigrants arrived in the United States via Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924, its peak years. As a result, it is estimated that more than 100 million Americans, or somewhere between one-quarter to one-third of the population of the nation can claim to have an ancestor who arrived in the United States at its facilities.
Typically, both first- and second-class passengers on incoming Atlantic ships were processed on board their vessels under the assumption that the cost of their passage attested to their financial and moral stability. By contrast, all third-class or steerage passengers were transferred by ferry to Ellis Island for a compulsory examination after having first arrived in New York. Once on Ellis Island, these immigrants were inspected in the main building by medical officers, in what was known as the six-second exam, for contagious illnesses and mental disabilities. Immigration officials were instructed to identify and limit the arrival of those individuals who could become burdens on American society such as anarchists, criminals, mental defectives, polygamists, contract laborers, as well as other additional undesirables. Overall, between one-fifth and one-quarter of immigrants passing through Ellis Island would be detained for medical reasons, including tuberculosis, fevers, and malnutrition. However, regardless of such health concerns, the vast majority of immigrants were eventually admitted into the United States. Immigrants were also asked to confirm their legal status and the information they had provided on board their ships. In addition, with the passage of the Federal Immigration Act in 1917, reading tests were performed as a requirement for admission to the United States. Similarly, women and children would often be held on Ellis until male relatives could be found who would vouch for, support, and provide them with shelter. Despite the sheer number of immigrants, the rigorous questioning, and the medical examinations, most individuals were processed within half a day of their arrival at Ellis Island. Moreover, despite Ellis’s reputation as the “island of tears,” only around 2 percent of all immigrants were refused entry to America.
Melting Pot
Most Americans are familiar with the concept of the United States as a “melting pot”: an understanding of the immigrant experience as an opportunity (some would say a responsibility) to discard the mores, social orders, and other trappings of the Old World in order to be recast in the cultural forge of the New World, emerging with a wholly reformed identity as an American. Few know, however, that the phrase was coined as the title of an early twentieth-century play about immigrants. The fact is, however, that there were always those immigrants who clung closely to the customs, traditions, and even the languages of their native cultures, and in recent years this trend has become more and more prevalent. Many immigrants today self-identify strongly with their roots, embracing economic opportunities in the United States while being much more skittish about cultural immersion.
C. Fee
With the passage of the National Origins Act (1924) and period quota laws, which limited the immigration of individuals from particular locations, the volume of immigrants entering through Ellis Island rapidly declined. This legislation reduced the number of persons processed in American ports, placing the responsibility with the American consulate in the immigrants’ country of origin. As a result of shifting needs, the facilities on Ellis Island were used during both the First (1914–1918) and the Second (1939–1945) World Wars as hospitals for wounded and returning servicemen. In addition, following World War I, Ellis Island was increasingly used as a site for detaining undesirables and suspected radicals prior to their deportation. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Ellis was also used by the United States Coast Guard as a training facility for their seamen and crews. In light of Ellis’s declining usage, the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), formerly the Bureau of Immigration, moved the operation of immigration affairs to Manhattan in 1954. As a result, Ellis Island was eventually put up for sale, an act that led to public outcry. However, the lack of sufficient offers resulted in the island and its facilities standing abandoned for more than a decade.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson remanded Ellis Island into the care of the National Parks Service, and owing to its location, historical ties, and symbolic relationship incorporated it into the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Despite his intentions, the rising global tensions in Vietnam and civil discord in America prevented Congress from allocating the necessary funds needed to care for the island’s facilities. Despite this setback, the main building on Ellis was reopened for public visitations by the National Park Service from 1976 until 1984. By 1982, however, the structural decline of the facilities on Ellis Island became apparent, and in response a commission called the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation began collecting both public and corporate donations to aid in the restoration and upkeep of the historical monument. The facilities on Ellis Island were closed to the public in 1984 until September 10, 1990, while the restoration was in progress. The reopened Ellis Island Immigration Museum has received more than a million visitors per year and regularly assists with ancestral research.
Ellis Island is a key symbol of America’s immigrant heritage and reflects the significance of New York as one of the most important gateways into the United States. Despite its reputation, however, the symbolic aspects of Ellis Island’s history have masked the history of the many exclusionary immigration policies of the period, which restricted the migration of varying peoples owing to their ethnicity, race, and heritage. Indeed, the experiences of many immigrants following passage of the National Origins Act in the 1920s and the Chinese Exclusion Act in the late nineteenth century do much to question the totalizing mythology of Ellis Island. In addition, the historical focus on Ellis Island as central to the American immigration experience serves to promote Eurocentric attitudes and to exclude the experiences of Asian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the historical narrative of immigration into the nation. In this regard, while Ellis Island is an important historical and cultural site that reflects the ideals of a specific period, the undercurrents of its history also do much to reveal the biases and tensions of America as a nation throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Sean Morton
See also America as the New Israel; Uncle Sam
Further Reading
Brownstone, David, Irene Franck, and Douglass Bownstone. 1979. Island of Hope, Island of Tears. New York: Rawson, Wade.
Cannato, Vincent J. 2010. American Passage: The History of Ellis Island. New York: HarperCollins.
Pitkin, Thomas. 1975. Keepers of the Gate: The History of Ellis Island. New York: New York University Press.